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François-Xavier Bagnoud Center
for Health and Human Rights
at Harvard University
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Note from the Director
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Sheltering at home on St. Patrick's Day
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I hope this newsletter finds you and your loved ones safe, sane, and healthy. I hope you are able to stay at home. For those who are part of the heroic response to this pandemic-whether you be health care worker or grocery store clerk-we thank you. I know that many of you have experienced loss and that we will continue to experience grave losses. I wanted to reassure you that although some at the FXB Center have fallen ill, they have recovered and thus far, all of us are healthy.
As you will see below, we are working hard to bring a human rights and equity lens to the response to the coronavirus. As we wrote on March 2, "The United States has many open wounds rooted in decades of racist policies and the criminalization of poverty. The coronavirus is likely to reveal deep failures and reinforce existing health inequities." We are leveraging our base of knowledge of homeless populations, the toll of mass incarceration, the despair of migrants and refugees, and global health to address the injustices exacerbated by this pandemic.
Dr. Mary T. Bassett
Director of
the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights and FXB Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health
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Covid-19 Advocacy and Research
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The Coronavirus Could Hit the U.S. Harder than Other Wealthy Countries, Op-ed, Washington Post March 2
By Mary T. Bassett and Natalia Linos
"Epidemics emerge along the fissures of our society, reflecting not only the biology of the infectious agent, but patterns of marginalization, exclusion and discrimination."
Read more here.
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Officials, Stop a Coronavirus Disaster: Release People from Prison, Op-ed, New York Times, March 30
The FXB Center's Mary T. Bassett, Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez, and Ford Foundation President Darren Walker penned an op-ed addressed to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, calling on him to release people from prison to protect both people currently incarcerated and the staff who work in these facilities. They addressed it to Governor Cuomo, but as Dr. Bassett later wrote."every federal, state, and local official who has the power to reduce the number of people in prison should do so NOW." Read more here.
Dr. Bassett joined an amicus brief with 13 other public health experts in support of an emergency petition to the MA Supreme Judicial Court to limit the spread of COVID-19 by reducing the number of people incarcerated. The court provided for some individual relief for those in pretrial detention. Another case for which Dr. Bassett participated in an amicus brief ended in release for the 61-year-old man with preexisting conditions. Dr. Bassett also organized a letter to MA Governor Charlie Baker from more than 70 faculty members at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School asking him to act expeditiously to stop COVID-19 in MA correctional facilities. The FXB Center's Drs. Satchit Balsari, Jennifer Leaning, and Professor Jacqueline Bhabha signed. Read the letter.
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Anti-Roma Racism is Spiraling During COVID-19 Pandemic, Health and Human Rights Journal April 7
By
Margareta Matache and
Jacqueline Bhabha
"Discriminating against Romani people,
already marginalized and forced to live and work in toxic and overcrowded conditions, is a grave human rights violation that threatens the public health of all members of the community, Roma and non Roma." Read more here.
Dr. Matache, the director of the FXB Center's
Roma Program, also wrote an op-ed for the Romanian newspaper Libertatea (in Romanian) on anti-Roma racism.
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U.S. county-level characteristics and data visualization tool to inform equitable COVID-19 response
Researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, its Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, and the FXB Center (including
Dr. Satchit Balsari) examined a range of factors that influence the risk of COVID-19 infection, severity of the disease, extent of the outbreak, and/or mortality in all counties in the United States. They also created a data visualization tool to help officials explore a range of biological, demographic and socioeconomic factors that may heighten the vulnerability of their communities.
Read more here.
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Upholding Non-Discrimination Principles in the Covid-19 Outbreak, Carr Center for Human Rights Policy Covid-19 Discussion Paper Series, April
By
Jacqueline Bhabha,
Laura Cordisco-Tsai,
Teresa Hodge, and
Laurin Leonard
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Non-discrimination principles require policy makers and public officials to
concentrate on particularly vulnerable sections of the community rather than leaving it purely
to individuals or to the market to come up with solutions."
Read more here.
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What can we learn from COVID-19? A parallel between public health and atrocity prevention, GAAMAC, April
Mô Bleeker, Special Envoy, Swiss Department of Foreign Affairs and Chair of Global Action Against Mass Atrocity Crimes (GAAMAC), interviewed the FXB Center's Dr. Jennifer Leaning, Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights about issues common to COVID-19 and atrocity prevention for GAAMAC's Prevention Talks Series. Watch here.
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The Fierce Urgency Of Now: Closing Glaring Gaps In US Surveillance Data On COVID-19, Health Affairs, April 14
By Nancy Krieger, Gregg Gonsalves,
Mary T. Bassett, William Hanage, Harlan M. Krumholz
"Where are the data on COVID-19 to understand who in the U.S. population is being tested, who is ill, and who is dying?... The time is now for the COVID-19 public health surveillance system to record and publicly share the critical data needed to protect the people's health and prevent health inequities."
Read more here.
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Other Spring 2020 Highlights
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Like so many others, we had to cancel or postpone important events and have transitioned to virtual events. Our first webinar was on equity for people experiencing homelessness during COVID-19 (excellent slides are available at the event's
web page). Since we had to postpone our planned International Roma Day event, we hosted a Facebook Watch Party, screening some videos from past conferences with Dr. Matache commenting in the chat.
We miss our doctoral student cohort and our fellows, some of whom had to cut their visit short--we wish we had been able to say goodbye face to face. The theme for our last in-person event, cosponsored with Women, Gender, and Health for International's Women's Day was radical solidarity--useful to remember in these times.
More FXB Center Writing
- Ongoing, Mary T. Bassett named by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to their Standing Committee on Emerging Infectious Diseases and 21st Century Health Threats, which has already produced several reports since March
- April 30, Public Health Calls for Solidarity, Not Warfare, Natalia Linos and Mary T. Bassett, Foreign Affairs
- April 24, The urgent need to transfer vulnerable migrants from Europe's largest migrant hotspot, Jacqueline Bhabha and Vasileia Digidiki, Opinion in British Medical Journal
- April 20, Responding to the Domestic Violence Crisis of COVID-19, Roshni Chakraborty, FXB Center Blog
- April 8, International Roma Day: The History of the FXB Center's Roma Program, FXB Center Blog
- April 1, Dr. Mary T. Bassett's Statement on COVID-19 for the Poor People's Campaign, FXB Center Blog
- April, The Yawning Gap Between Theory and Practice, Review of The Youngest Citizens: Children's Rights in Latin America, Jacqueline Bhabha, Revista
- March 30, COVID-19: Finding Comfort in Respecting Rights and Protecting the Most Vulnerable, Natalia Linos, Health and Human Rights Journal Blog and Op-ed in Kathimerini
- March 24, Aggregated mobility data could help fight COVID-19, Satchit Balsari co-author, Science Magazine
- March 22, Protecting Children's Rights As Schools Close, Jacqueline Bhabha, Margaret M. Sullivan, and Mary T. Bassett, Health and Human Rights Journal
- March 18, COVID-19: Observations from Spain (Viviendo Espana), Sergio Aguayo, Op-ed Column, Reforma
- February 7, Greece's proposed ˜floating wall" shows the failure of EU migration policies, Vasileia Digidiki and Jacqueline Bhabha, Op-ed, The Guardian
Selected FXB Center in the Media
- April 23, Dr. Satchit Balsari quoted extensively in Direct Relief blog, Not Just How, but Who: Tracing the Indirect Deaths Caused by Covid-19 By Talya Myers;
- April 20, Dr. Mary T. Bassett served as a technical advisor for the bi-partisan report Roadmap for Pandemic Resilience, organized by Harvard's Safra Center for Ethics;
- April 16, Dr. Margareta Matache quoted extensively in Radio Free Europe, Depiction Of Roma As Crows Exposes Deeper Racism Within Romania, By Alison Mutler;
- April 11, Dr. Mary T. Bassett quoted in New York Times editorial, How to Save Black and Hispanic Lives in a Pandemic By the Editorial Board;
- April 9, Dr. Mary T. Bassett interviewed in Spectrum News, NY1 video and article, Racial Disparities, No Surprise, Now What? By Erin Billups;
- April 7, Dr. Natalia Linos, interview with Global Citizen Today, 5 Reasons COVID-19 Will Impact the Fight to End Extreme Poverty By Leah Rodriguez;
- April 7, Dr. Margareta Matache, conversation with Erika Schlager for Helsinki On the Hill podcast, The Roma By U.S. Helsinki Commission;
- April 2, Dr. Mary T. Bassett, quoted extensively, Harvard Gazette article, In Prisons, A Looming Coronavirus Crisis By Colleen Walsh;
- March 30, Dr. Mary T. Bassett, interview, Public Health podcast, White Supremacy and the Health of Populations With Nicholas Diamond;
- March 24, Dr. Mary T. Bassett, featured, Harvard Gazette article, Will Inequality Worsen the Toll of the Pandemic in the U.S.? By Alvin Powell;
- March 18, Dr. Mary T. Bassett, quoted, Association of American Medical Colleges article, The New Coronavirus Affects Us All. But Some Groups May Suffer More By Stacy Weiner.
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Social Solidarity
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Join Us in Lifting Up #HumanePolicy
During the pandemic, the world has seen Iran and Indonesia freeing thousands of prisoners, California housing homeless in hotels, Portugal treating migrants as residents, the U.S. loosening its restrictions on medical treatment for drug abuse, Paris renting hotel rooms for victims of domestic violence. Join us in highlighting practices and policies helpful to vulnerable people who suffer disproportionate harm in the epidemic by using the hashtag #humanepolicy or #policyforgood. You can amplify our social media posts or post other examples of positive policies in the time of COVID-19 yourself with those hashtags.
FXB Fellows, Former Affiliates
This is a global pandemic and so many of you are in the midst of it. Tell us your stories of this time, let us know how you are doing. We are thinking of you. Email us at
fxbcenter_info@hsph.harvard.edu.
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